29.9.17

Twitter finds links to hundreds of Russian-backed bot accounts

Following news that Russian-linked operatives bought Facebook ads during the 2016 presidential election to sow divisiveness amidst the American public, Twitter announced on Thursday that it had uncovered a similar scheme afoot within its own social network.

Of the 450 accounts released by Facebook as part of its
investigation, Twitter was able to match 22 of those to accounts on its
own site. All 22 were immediately suspended. What's more, Twitter found
another 179 accounts linked to or associated with the original 22 that
had no ties to any of the 450 Facebook ones.
Twitter VP for Public
Policy Colin Crowell reportedly met with members of both the Senate and
House Select Committees on Intelligence to discuss Russia's involvement
in the 2016 election. "One congressional investigator has said that the
Facebook accounts from the International Research Agency are likely
just the 'tip of the iceberg,'" a congressional aide, speaking on
anonymity, told the Washington Post.
And rather than pull a Facebook and have to continually backtrack (and eventually sort of apologize for)
against increasing government pressure, Twitter went into these
hearings by proactively sharing a roundup of three Russia Today accounts
that targeted the US market with ads during the 2016 election.
According to Twitter, the RT accounts spent $274,100 to promote 1,823
ads directed at followers of major media outlets and sought to promote
RT's own coverage of trending news events.
Twitter also shared
information regarding election voting scams like the "text-to-vote" one
targeted at potential Clinton voters (narrator: you can't vote via text
message). While Twitter did not reportedly see any links to Russia, the
company did notice that many of the scams appeared to be automated.
Moving
forward the company promised to continue its efforts to eradicate spam,
bots and compromised accounts from its platform. "We'll be rolling out
several changes to the actions we take when we detect spammy or
suspicious activity," a Twitter rep wrote in a release.
"Including introducing new and escalating enforcements for suspicious
logins, Tweets, and engagements, and shortening the amount of time
suspicious accounts remain visible on Twitter while pending
confirmation." Great, next maybe they can tackle that niggling problem
of all the nazis and trolls.